


the rhythm of the rain

by xerampelinae



Category: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 01:02:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14093583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xerampelinae/pseuds/xerampelinae
Summary: Hero had always wanted to have a family. Round-faced children and a faceless but beloved spouse. Beatrice? Not so much. She was satisfied with the idea of a house next to Hero’s. Their parents laughed.“Maybe that’s why it hurts so much,” Hero murmurs. “It’s not--not just what hedidbut the future that was lost with him.”-Beatrice and Hero return to their lives in Boston after the wedding falls through.





	the rhythm of the rain

When the city goes silent  
The ringing in my ears gets violent  
-Fall Out Boy, “Jet Pack Blues”

-

August in Boston is a clinging, sticky heat. Stepping off the plane at Logan is always a shock. There’ll be no relief in their apartment, save for that of a cross-breeze. Work, at least, is air-conditioned. And yet it feels like it’s the cold depths of December, stark and gloomy.

“Alright?” Beatrice asks. Hero’s looking tired but there are no strict recommendations on flying post-concussion. There’s only the usual recommendations: rest up beforehand, maintain hydration, avoid distraction. Hero had insisted that flying would be fine and that it had been a couple weeks since she’d had any symptoms.

It’s not been that long, not to Beatrice’s mind. One day they will stop counting the days and weeks since the disaster. For now they’re still piecing themselves together.

-

Hero had always wanted to have a family. Round-faced children and a faceless but beloved spouse. Beatrice? Not so much. She was satisfied with the idea of a house next to Hero’s. Their parents laughed.

“Maybe that’s why it hurts so much,” Hero murmurs. “It’s not--not just what he _did_ but the future that was lost with him.”

“But it’s not,” Beatrice says desperately. She’s not used to being the hopeful one but oh, she’s trying, for Hero she’s trying. “Even if it’s not with him, you can still have that future.”

But Hero’s shaking her head, eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can want that anymore.”

Beatrice gently enfolds Hero in her arms. “I think--you do not have to choose now. All you have to do is heal.”

-

Rain comes, here and there. When they’re home in the apartment they share, they open up a window and camp out by it. The sound of the falling rain drowns out the silent spaces that ring oppressively between them; they have forgotten how to fill its void or how to be at peace with it. In August, there’s no break from humidity, even when the rain blessedly breaks through. But as the months pass, the rain brings a progressively refreshing crispness.

Beatrice does not regret failure to pursue summer romance; she and Benedick are not better off as lovers. They are friends, when they have time for it. He’s abroad and she’s working her way through residency at Children’s Hospital. She doesn’t want to think of what it would be like if she and Hero had both returned to Boston with broken hearts. 

Well. Does it count as a broken heart if you’re insufficiently heterosexual for the relationship? Beatrice considers that briefly before discarding the thought. She has more important things to do like make sure that they’re both eating and sleeping as regularly as can be managed. 

Hero used to be the lodestone that guided their offshoot of the family. It was natural for her. When Beatrice was starting medical school, Hero was entering a nursing program. She’d come up with the idea of doing things together to normalize--she missed home more than Beatrice did--but Beatrice had been the one to suggest eating together as often as they could. Sometimes it’s the only good part of the day, however late or early it gets pushed.

After summer--  
after the wedding that did not go through--  
after home fell apart--  
after Hero was hurt--  
Beatrice realized they couldn’t continue as they had before.

There is no more space in their lives for people who hurt others so purposefully and so easily. Beatrice must be the one watching and careful. She sits in the hospital, listening to the words and movements of those taking care of her cousin. She chokes on tears that do not come.

Her hands shake. Really, she could drive home, but she came with her uncle and he has been forced away by some local crisis. Benedick drives her instead. Hero needs something other than a white dress stained with blood to wear leaving the hospital.

Beatrice cries in the car instead, smothering her sobs with McDonald’s napkins from the glove compartment.

“If you asked me--” Benedick says, when the flood eases.

“But I won’t,” Beatrice says. “She wouldn’t want me to. They were your friends first.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Benedick says. He looks older like this. He’s known the Prince and Claudio for years--has laughed and struggled and fought at their sides for years. He’s never before known this kind of violence from them, this recoil. All the lightness that their friendships brought him is gone in this moment.

Conversely, Beatrice looks younger like this. She looks like a student struggling through a final’s week breakdown in a friend’s car, eyes red and breath shaking gustily free. She’s done close to the same for another, right down to the iced coffee sweating and wobbling in her hand (she wishes it were from Dunkin’s, she thinks that alone would have shifted the situation over just enough that the tears would not have come).

“Just--drop me at my house, please,” Beatrice says, abruptly exhausted. The fire is gone from her speech now. She cannot fight for the future that Hero had dreamed of, only for Hero herself. “I need to get some things for Hero.”

-

Hero and Beatrice return to Boston in early August. It is far earlier than they’d planned before summer came, but Martha’s Vineyard is no longer a sanctuary. There is too much hurt there to find again the solace of their childhood home. However much Martha’s Vineyard grows in summer, it is still full to the brim with the ghosts of what could have been and what happened. The news spreads down the gossip chain from the year-rounders to the summer residents. There is no where to go to escape, even if the deliberately cruel are avoided.

They would have left earlier if Beatrice weren’t so concerned over the effect of flying on a traumatic brain injury.

-

There were quite a few surprised when Beatrice matched to Children’s Hospital. She’d been happy to stay in Boston-- _and_ still in Longwood, still close to Harvard Medical, still happily familiar--but to be focusing on pediatrics was apparently unimaginable.

Hero was delighted, especially since she’d entered a nursing program at Simmons. The jokes about getting an MRS degree slid easily off her back; whatever the future brought, she’d have nursing. 

It was busy, but they made time for each other. Hero’s dorm room was a god-send when winter hit hard enough that the T shut down and Beatrice had too much studying to do to tromp all the way out through the accumulated snow to her shitty apartment and then back to Longwood.

Blessedly there were free days where they could visit the movie theater or take the time to walk out to and wander Newbury Street. They wander the Back Bay and explore the Commons and Public Gardens. When they get lost, they look first for the Prudential--“Where’s my girl?” they say, “where’s the Pru? I’m lost without her”--instead of whipping out their phones. Occasionally their parents come up and they have boisterous meals here and there in Boston, unless there’s a game at Fenway and everywhere is flooded with Red Sox fans.

One day they will be back to those days, Beatrice knows. For now they are surviving. This hurt will not endure.

-

“I wonder--” Hero says, perched at the window and cupping a steaming cup of cocoa, “did he ever love me? Did I ever really love him?”

It’s early November, but the first snow of the season is drifting gently down. It is accumulating but only slowly; true winter will bring more serious snowfall. For now there is no real inconvenience to the snow. 

“I don’t know,” Beatrice admits. “It looked real enough at the time.”

“I don’t know either,” Hero says, but it’s not as tortured as it would have been months before. “And even when the truth came out--the trust had been lost. Even if he had wanted--I don’t know if I could have gone back.

“I don’t know if I would’ve wanted to.”

“That’s okay,” Beatrice says. 

Hero shakes her head but huffs out a laugh: inelegant but genuine. Beatrice has missed it.

“What?” Beatrice asks, laughing a little herself.

“‘Where’s the Pru?’” Hero says with mock seriousness, “‘without her guiding light I’m so lost.’”

“That,” Beatrice says deliberately, “was wicked bad. You can’t even see the Pru from any of the windows.”

But they’re laughing at least. It’s a rusty sound but at least it’s honest.

-

They’re walking in one of the sky bridges when Hero catches sight of a cavalcade on the street. It’s the Prince and his escorts: everyone that had been there those nameless days that they carry the weight of. Hero pauses; Beatrice does the same as she realizes why. Then Hero simply slips her arm into Beatrice’s and they walk on together.

Outside snow drifts peacefully down. It’s not the rain, but it keeps its own rhythm.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:  
> Mood: a little less “triumphantly showing how well I’m doing without you” a little more “surviving and reflecting” x the author misses Boston and kept typing her own damn name while writing this because Thanks Shakespeare. All the fucking nostalgia.
> 
> Title from Fall Out Boy’s “ Jet Pack Blues”:  
> She's in a long black coat tonight  
> Waiting for me in the downpour outside  
> She's singing, "Baby, come home" in a melody of tears  
> While the rhythm of the rain keeps time


End file.
